Stephen Riden is featured in a November 17, 2011, Forbes story titled “Who Owns Employees’ Twitter Accounts?”
The article is written by Forbes staff writer, Kashmir Hill. It follows an earlier Forbes story covering a lawsuit filed by a company against its former employee for using a Twitter account after leaving the company.
In the lawsuit, the company, Phonedog, claims that its former employee, Noah Kravitz, established a Twitter account at the company’s request, and then used that account to promote the company’s services.
When the employee left, the Twitter account went with him. So the company sued and is seeking damages for the alleged theft of its trade secrets, i.e., the Twitter account and its followers.
In the article, Steve discusses the importance of addressing the use of social media accounts in the employee handbook.
It’s an interesting case, and illustrates the importance of employers and employees hammering out these details in advance. “It’s much cheaper to spell this out ahead of time than to litigate it after the fact,” says Stephen Riden, a partner at Beck Reed Riden LLP, who specializes in employment law. He points to Dell’s social media policy as a good example of this, calling it “forward-thinking.”
Click here to read more about the intersection of social media and employment disputes.
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